Leslie Speer

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Associate Professor,Industrial Design

Leslie Speer is a designer and educator with more than twenty five years of experience
in the design world. She received her BSID from California State University at Long Beach, did graduate studies at ENSCI in Paris, and received a Master’s in Design from Middlesex University in London. She has worked for companies and clients in the USA, Europe and Mexico
including E.I. Dupont de Nemours, Phillips NV, Praxis Product Design, Sun Microsystems,
frog design, Case de Cultura (Tenancingo), and Banomex, among others. She has worked
for over a decade with artisans in small villages in Mexico, Costa Rica, Cameroon,
and China, helping them to create viable products for the world market. Her current
work focuses on social entrepreneurship and on developing strategies for applying
more inclusive participatory design methods to emerging markets in developing regions
of the world. She was the Assistant Program Head of the ID program at California College
of the Arts for 7 years, has taught a multidisciplinary course with UC Berkeley, and
CCA for over a decade, and has just entered her 7th year at SJSU. She is founder and
current Vice Chair of the IDSA Design for the Majority Professional Interest Section.